Multiversity’s history column celebrates the start of 2023 by resetting the clock on our year-by-year chronology of the comic industry. Today, we’ll dive deep into the past to examine the evolutionary ancestors of our favorite modern reading material. Let’s start with one of the oldest sequential narratives…
Romans were known for their architecture, and Trajan’s Column (shown above) could easily be mistaken for a generic example of their decorative artwork. The column was erected in Rome in the year 113, just a few years after the end of the second Dacian War. A closer examination of the 88-foot shaft’s spiral design reveals 155 sequential scenes recounting the history of the two Dacian Wars. This is obviously not a comic book, but it does fit the requirements for most working definitions of “comic” storytelling.
Although the precise motivation behind its construction has been fogged by time, the function of Trajans’s Column was innovative in its time. If its architect borrowed/stole the idea for its narrative structure from some other contemporary (or if he reused a previous idea), those older examples have been forgotten. It is clear, however, that the design has inspired many similar structures in the centuries since. The storytelling method was also adapted in other formats, such as the Bayeux Tapestry in 1100.
Single-panel comics were primitive but established by 1883. They regularly appeared in magazines and newspapers and were quite popular. It was in this fertile environment that 43 year old cartoonist Palmer Cox sold “St Nicholas” magazine on The Brownies, a group of good-natured, fairy-like creatures he had been developing in local print media for a few years. They were the first successful recurring comic characters, largely because Cox was aiming his work at children instead of an adult or all-ages audience.
Cox’s real innovation was in merchandising. His characters were the first cartoons to be used by manufacturers to sell more of their otherwise unrelated products, like sheet music, bowling pins, or slot machines. Although Cox did his best to protect his creation and profit from its exploitation, the copyright law at the time was inadequate. Changes to it in 1891 further muddied matters, as lawyers disagreed about what the updates meant. While Cox became quite wealthy from the Brownies books and official merchandise, he had to endure the constant slight of infringement and bootlegs.
In 1893, James “Jimmy” Swinnerton’s amusing illustrations appearing in the San Francisco Examiner as “The Little Bears” was the first comic strip. That is, the first comic with multiple panels as opposed to the single panel work of Cox and others.
Maybe.
This column almost always presents material and events as absolutes with an occasional caveat or an overly narrow superlative. These things are easy to verify and/or generally agreed upon, especially if they occurred in the last 90 years. In this particular case things are far murkier, so I’ll just lay out what I have and let you decide.
According to Allan Holtz’s 2012 encyclopedia “American Newspaper Comics,” the little bear began in October 1893 as a mascot advertising a local expo scheduled for early 1894. It was retained in the weather report afterward because readers/editors liked it, but it’s not clear on when exactly it morphed from a single image of the bear reacting to a headline into a full strip. It was no later than 1895, when it received dedicated space on the children’s page and featured multiple illustrations.
However, according to Don Markstein, the first Little Bear banner appeared in June 1982, more than a year earlier, and there’s no mention of an expo. Perhaps Holtz didn’t look back far enough, and assumed the bear was created for the expo. Perhaps Swinnerton used bears often in his illustrations, and Markstein didn’t make a distinction between a bear and a little bear. Either way, if the bear didn’t begin appearing in sequential scenes until 1895, is it fair to say the strip dates back to 1893?
And just in case this isn’t muddy enough yet, Robert Harvey’s 2014 book “Insider Histories of Cartooning” disagrees with both Holtz and Markstein. He points to some untitled sequential artwork by Tom E Powers in the October 1, 1893 edition of the Chicago Inter Ocean Illustrated Supplement as the first comic strip.
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The first booklet reprinting comic strips was published in 1897, and the commercial success of the format quickly became apparent. Two entrepreneurs who jumped on the band wagon early were Victor Cupples and Arthur Leon. They founded their company, Cupples & Leon, in 1902 and began publishing comic strip reprints in 1903. By getting into the market fairly early, they were able to secure rights to popular strips like The Katzenjammer Kids and Happy Hooligan. These first editions had limited full color.
Cupples & Leon became one of the most prolific publishers of comic strip reprints over the next thirty years with 100+ different books. In 1916, they began a black and white line of 48-page books with one daily strip per page, cut in half to fill the page with two tiers. The interiors were in black and white, and the flimsy cardboard covers were in black and red. They were all 9½” square and sold for a quarter. They also tried other formats, like a $0.60 version with twice the pages and a dust jacket, and the $0.75 Big Book.
In 1934, just when the modern comic book business was about to explode, Cupples & Leon got out of the comic book business and focused on their thriving juvenile prose fiction. The company was eventually swallowed by a larger publisher in the 1950s.
Bud Fisher’s “Mutt & Jeff” strip was created in 1907 for the San Francisco Examiner. It became so popular over the next five years that the newspaper’s owner, William Randolph Hearst, wanted to put it in his other 27 newspapers too. This syndication was an innovation for comics at the time and soon made “Mutt & Jeff” popular across the country. Hearst capitalized on the success by syndicating other comics, and created a whole new department to focus solely on the task. The group, led by Moses Koenigsberg, was spun off as an independent subsidiary in 1914. Taking its name from a shortened version of its leader, King Features created a model for other newspaper tycoons to copy. Seeing the wealth it could bring, it wasn’t long before syndication became every cartoonist’s dream.
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